Crash and squirm

Tonight's the night the ghosts and ghouls come out, and fear stalks the land. But why do we feel the need to be scared? Because horror reflects the fears not just of individuals, but of societies, argues Anne Billson

The good news about the recession is that we can look forward to some great horror movies. The fright genre has traditionally flourished in straitened times. Weimar Germany, the Great Depression and the 1970s oil crisis all coincided, not so coincidentally, with new waves of innovative, inventive nightmare visions that hold up a mirror to their eras just as much as the po-faced social-realist dramas of the day.

Of course, that mirror is cracked - all the better to reflect what's lurking beneath the surface. But what better way of suggesting an economy in freefall than the skewed world of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, devoid of reassuring angles or reliable narrators? It's a tale told by a madman, in a world gone mad. If you're looking for a sense of the moral chaos and uncertainty of the Depression, where better to find it than in the shambling creatures running amok through Frankenstein or King Kong? And how better to understand the decline of traditional family values than with Night of the Living Dead, in which loving brothers chow down on their siblings, mothers are devoured by their own children, young couples are roasted to death and heroes are killed by friendly fire?

Horror movies have always been a way of addressing our most unspeakable fears and desires. Sometimes these are smuggled past our defences disguised as zombies or werewolves - not to slip one over on the censors (though there was that, too, back in the day) but because it's a way for us to absorb notions about death, decay and the human condition, which in their unadulterated forms would be just too vast, distressing or disgusting to contemplate. And maybe a tad boring, as well. Who wants grim tracts about drug addiction or sexually transmitted disease when you can see their effects just as powerfully, and far more entertainingly, acted out by the nomadic vampires of Near Dark? And who wants to see a serious movie about consumerism? Wouldn't you rather watch George Romero's 1978 film Dawn of the Dead, in which four people fend off flesh-eating zombies in a shopping mall?

Nowadays, there seems to be more collective anxiety than ever for horror movies to tap into. For instance, feral youths torment nice young middle-class couples in Eden Lake and Them. In Cabin Fever, college graduates on a bucolic jaunt succumb one by one to the sort of flesh-eating bug that one can so easily pick up in today's hospitals. And 28 Days Later offers a vision of a Britain overrun by a virus that turns its inhabitants into fast-moving, flesh-eating zombies, only a few notches down from the rowdy binge-drinkers of tabloid cautionary tales.

But horror doesn't thrive on realism, nor is it so easy to pin down. For every horror film that obviously seems to be "about" something, you can be sure there are even more insidious globs of unpleasantness bubbling away underneath - globs that can't be boiled down into neat newspaper headlines about hoodies, home invasion or the latest strain of killer flu.

Advances in digital effects mean it's easier than ever for film-makers to slice and dice the human body, which make the excruciating, realistically depicted sufferings in "torture porn" movies such as Saw or Martyrs even harder to watch than the crude 1960s splatterfests of Herschell Gordon Lewis. But the results don't haunt your dreams - or at least not in the way their makers may have intended. Despite Eli Roth's glib attempts to pass off Hostel and Hostel: Part II as a response to the tortures of Abu Ghraib, I suspect what appeal such films may have to horror fans is more on a subliminal, quasi-religious level. These ghastly images are not so far removed from the agonies of The Passion of the Christ, or even the lingering, voyeuristic close-ups of Falconetti's tear-stained face in The Passion of Joan of Arc.

The intricate death-dealing contraptions in the Saw and Hostel movies stirred up something in the back of my memory, but it was some time before I worked out exactly what they reminded me of - the paintings of Bosch and Breugel, where luckless sinners are impaled, dissected or burnt alive in elaborately conceived engines of infernal torture manned by demonic imps. It could be that "torture porn" caters purely to sadomasochistic tastes. Or maybe it's simply the latest rite of passage for teenagers keen to demonstrate their toughness by proving they can sit through the horrific images without fainting or throwing up. Or perhaps it's nothing less than a modern, secular substitute for the traditional idea of Hell. But it just goes to show there's more to any sort of horror movie than meets the eye.

The most effective and disturbing horror movies don't set out to impress you with their clever allusions to current events. They try first and foremost to scare you silly. The Descent made me hyperventilate with fear, though I couldn't say whether that was due to the claustrophobia, the darkness, the blood, the flesh-eating foetus-like creatures or a combination of all these elements. And frankly, I'm not sure I want to know. Whether it was a hitherto unsuspected hatred of my body, or latent fear of giving birth to mutants, or being eaten alive by the underclass or something even more primal, I would rather leave it to my subconscious to deal with.

Because horror movies tend to approach their themes more obliquely than other genres, they often succeed in getting under our skin where more self-consciously "serious" mainstream treatments of contemporary issues fail to cause a dent. Horror films draw on metaphors that are not polished and hermetically sealed, but misshapen or amorphous, like the monsters themselves, which leaves all the more room for individuals to interpret them on a personal level. For most people, Final Destination was a slasher movie in which a bunch of people narrowly avoid being killed in an exploding airplane and are subsequently picked off in freak accidents when Death, like a crazy accountant, attempts to balance its books. For me, though, it was a full-blown memento mori, perhaps not quite on a par with Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries or Akira Kurosawa's Ikiru, but maybe not so far off. A nerve-jangling reminder that, any second, I could trip over the cat and accidentally stab myself in the carotid artery with a ballpoint pen, so I should probably take steps to make peace with my relatives or build a children's playground before that happened.

The biggest bogeyman success story of the past 100 years has been that of the vampire, who, like any good predator, has moved with the times, swapping Bela Lugosi's tux and cape for the tight leather trousers of Blade or Underworld. The vampire's metaphorical reach has expanded to include sexuality, capitalism, disease, old age, drug addiction, alternative lifestyles and what have you. Most impressive of all, the sly bloodsuckers have infiltrated not just the nightmares but also the daydreams of alienated youth, who seem only too willing to invite them into their bedrooms and embrace them as fellow outsiders, romantic heroes or potential boyfriends. But vampires can take it; it's only when you start nudging them too far in a single direction, as Francis Ford Coppola did in Bram Stoker's Dracula by playing up the Count's search for true love ("I have crossed oceans of time to find you") that the mythology loses its bite and starts getting sloppier than a Mills & Boon romance.

Horror, like a person appointed as the keeper of humanity's dirtiest little secrets, remains the most despised and reviled of genres, one that has yet to be accorded even that limited measure of respect sometimes granted to thrillers or science fiction. On the one hand, horror movies are regarded with scorn, like a spotty teenage habit that needs to be outgrown. On the other, they provoke cries of outrage or demands for them to be banned as a corrupting influence, especially when tabloids are looking for a scapegoat or backbenchers are seeking publicity. But to stamp out the genre, as certain self-styled guardians of public morality would no doubt like to do, would be not just impossible, but psychologically dangerous. How else are we supposed to cope with our collective anxieties about terrorism, religious extremism, global warming, the underclass, the overclass, old age, sickness, the credit crunch and (if the wrong party gets elected into the White House next week) the End of Days?